Liminal.news

introducing a new magazine exploring the in-between, ambiguous, and transcendent

A Magazine for Strange Times

Over the past months, I have been working with a small team to launch a new media company and online magazine, Liminal.news. Besides myself, our team includes co-editor Jeremy Johnson and web developer Kyle Outlaw, plus contributing editors Alnoor Ladha, Lili Kindelhofer, and Michael Ellsberg.

With the pandemic, the world has clearly plunged into what anthropologists call a “liminal zone.” We believe an independent media venture like this one is urgently needed right now to help people make sense of the overwhelming deluge of murky conspiracy theories, fake news, and fear mongering. Without a coherent story or collective narrative, how will we find a way forward together?

We explore the concept of liminality in this introductory essay:

“Anthropologist Victor Turner saw liminal processes as anti-structural, anarchic, but also the source of all structure; the abysmal no-place out of which new forms of cultural and social life emerge – like Strange Attractors from chaos. He found symbolic parallels to death, uterine existence, invisibility, darkness, and wilderness.

Liminality defines a crucial stage within initiatory processes. In traditional cultures, candidates get taken from their homes and thrown into a dangerous new reality. Everything they knew – all of their familiar references – are torn from them.

Liminal states are indeterminate, undifferentiated. Anything can happen in them: Suffering, torture, death, terror, chaos, madness – but also renewal, spiritual vision, transcendence, the joyful acceptance of a new mission.”

With Liminal, we hope to provide a trusted resource for exploring new ideas and solutions. We support a societal shift into a new paradigm embracing inner experience – the realm of the Psyche – along with material, ecological, and political conditions.

Liminal.news seeks collaborators and contributors of all types: Writers, editors, video producers, podcasters, advertisers, investors. If you want to get involved, please email me - Danielpinchbeck@liminal.news .